An ultrasound imaging system includes a transducer array (202) with a plurality of transducer elements (206) configured to transmit a pulsed field beam into a scan field of view, receive echo signals produced in response to the pulsed field interacting with particles/structure flowing/moving in the scan field of view, and generate electrical signals indicative of the echo signals. The ultrasound imaging system further includes a beamformer (212) including multiple synthetic transmit aperture beamformers configured to process the electrical signals over a plurality of processing channels (312) into corresponding receive-beams of RF-data with a beam-level delay, channel-level delays, a beam-level gain and channel-level gains. The ultrasound imaging system further includes a velocity processor (216) configured to estimate a flow velocity of the structure flowing in the scan field of view from the RF-data. The ultrasound imaging system further includes a rendering engine (224) configured to display the flow velocity estimate on a display (226) with color-coding.
Legal claims defining the scope of protection, as filed with the USPTO.
2. The system of claim 1, wherein the velocity processor estimates the flow velocity by wall filtering each receive-beam, determining an auto-correlation of each receive-beam, adding the auto-correlation of receive-beams from different acquisition-packages to produce summed auto-correlations, and determining a phase of the summed auto-correlations.
3. The system of claim 2, wherein the velocity processor further discriminates between tissue and flow by determining an amplitude/power of each receive-beam before and after wall filtering, adding the amplitude/power of receive-beams from different acquisition-packages, estimating average threshold values from the summed amplitude/power information, and thresholding on high-resolution velocity information.
9. The system of claim 7, wherein the multiple synthetic transmit aperture beamformers include single-stage beamformers that process receive-channel echo-signals into receive-beams-groups of three receive-beams of RF-data, of which a receive-beam-pair is formed with a transverse oscillation, taking into account an estimated depth-dependent width of the transmit-beam, and wherein the vector-velocity processor interpolates and aligns decimated scan-lines with a lateral-velocity component to match a number of scan-lines with an axial-velocity component before displaying the vector-velocity information.
14. The system of claim 1, wherein the beamformers is a dual-stage synthetic transmit aperture beamformer.
16. The method of claim 15, wherein the beamforming includes only single-stage beamforming in which the channel-level delays and beam-level delays are applied once and summed in a single stage.
17. The method of claim 15, wherein the beamforming includes multi-stage beamforming in which channel-level delay-and-sum is performed in a first stage, intermediate RF-beams are buffered, and beam-level delay-and-sum is performed in a subsequent-stage.
19. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 18, wherein the computer readable instructions cause the processor to employ only single-stage beamforming in which the channel-level delays and beam-level delays are applied once and summed in a single stage.
20. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 18, wherein the computer readable instructions cause the processor to employ multi-stage beamforming in which channel-level delay-and-sum is performed in a first stage, intermediate RF-beams are buffered, and beam-level delay-and-sum is performed in a subsequent-stage.
Cooperative Patent Classification codes for this invention. Click any code to explore related patents in that topic.
December 28, 2015
September 6, 2022
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